false position. The very constraint she was forced to put upon herself
made her wrath all the deeper. She was no angel yet, though Mr.
Burne-Jones might have taken her for a model. She was a quick-tempered
little piece of humanity; her passions burned with Highland intensity,
her sense of indignation was strong and keen, and the atmosphere of
her home, the hard struggle against intolerable bigotry and malicious
persecution had from her very babyhood tended to increase this. She had
inherited all her father's passion for justice and much of his excessive
pride, while her delicate physical frame made her far more sensitive.
Moreover, though since that June morning in the museum she had gained a
peace and happiness of which in the old days she had never dreamed, yet
the entire change had in many ways increased the difficulties of her
life. Such a wrench, such an upheaval as it had involved, could not but
tell upon her immensely. And, besides, she had in every way for the last
three months been living at high pressure.

The grief, the disapproval, the contemptuous pity of her secularist
friends had taxed her strength to the utmost, but she had stood firm,
and had indeed been living on the heights.

Now the months of Charles Osmond's careful preparation were over, her
baptism was over, and a little weary and overdone with all that she had
lived through that summer, she had come down to Greyshot expecting rest,
and behold, fresh vexations had awaited her!

A nice Christian world! A nice type of a clergyman! she thought to
herself, as bitterly as in the old days, and with a touch of sorrow
added. The old lines from "Hiawatha," which had been so often on her
lips, now rang in her head:

"For his heart was hot within him, Like a living coal his heart was."

She longed to get up and go, but that would have put her aunt in a yet
more painful position, and might have annoyed Lady Caroline even more
than her presence. She would have given anything to have fainted after
the convenient fashion of the heroines of romance, but never had she
felt so completely strung up, so conscious of intense vitality. There
was nothing for it but endurance. And for two mortal hours she had to
sit and endure! Mr. Cuthbert never spoke to her; her neighbor on the
other side glanced at her furtively from time to time, but preserved a
stony silence; there was an uncomfortable cloud on her hostess's brow;
while her aunt, whom she could see at some dista